Recently, a President/CMO of a sales and marketing tech AI firm that focuses on market research, messaging, and positioning wanted to learn more about ABM. Still, he said let’s take sales out of the equation as they are already doing account-based emailing, and let’s not speak to social as they were already doing LinkedIn ads. This President/CMO failed to realize they’re doing ABM in pockets. ABM is about layering social, email, digital and live interactions to create the right experiences to move accounts forward. It’s about improving your interactions and the account experience.
In this podcast, Eric Gruber (Personal ABM CEO) talks to Claudia Hoeffner (VP of Revenue Marketing for Nexthink about how they are taking an account-based everything approach and creating custom experiences along the complete buyer’s journey.
Key Points From This ABM Done Right Podcast with Guest Expert Claudia Hoeffner
- ABM should not be exclusive to marketing – ABM needs to go beyond the marketing channel, especially when marketing and selling to enterprise accounts. It requires teams to go beyond alignment and move toward integration and orchestration from the very beginning, so it’s not about waiting for the MQL or download. When you listen to the recording, you’ll see how leadership, sales, marketing, product marketing, field teams, professional service teams, channel teams, and partners have a role in Nexthink’s account-based program and how Nexthink creates a winning team for each must-win account.
- You need to create specific account plans and account experiences for specific accounts with specific scenarios. For example, Nexthink creates a war room for accounts such as those showing intent. Still, the team is challenged to get to the buying committee, or currently, there is no urgency or budget assigned to a digital transformation project, or a key player left an account. Nexthink creates custom-built account plans to get accounts from prequalified to qualified, where they can run a proof of concept. There needs to be a plan on how you will align with these accounts, their strategic priorities and their needs, how you will reframe their thoughts and ideas, and how you will build a connection and make the business case for change.
- Nexthink is taking a top-to-bottom approach to prioritizing and segmenting accounts. They focus on the 20% of accounts that can deliver 80% of their revenue growth and where there is a real reason for outreach beyond the account being part of their ICP. You’ll learn how context is even more important than characteristics.
- Nexthink is balancing “scale” with the need to get hyper-personal for specific accounts, as taking a personal approach requires great investments in time and resources.
- You cannot effectively do ABM if you are not hyper-personal with a select few target accounts, as you will not be able to change sales and marketing motions, and it will just be a campaign. And, ABM is not about campaigns.
